Zenna Vortex: Destiny: James Dean Rebel Girl
by LA Knight
Summary: A strange wind out of the east. These weird kids that can appear and disappear in the blink of an eye. Fairy tales and old legends come to life. Kate doesn't care. She's only interested in finding out where her best friend is... and how to get him back.
1. Chapter 1

**Destiny  
****The Soul-Shifting Adventures of a James Dean Rebel Girl**

.

**Chapter One  
****Katie and Jamie**

.

.

Everyone wants to be special. Especially when you're young. So everyone does something cool to make themselves special, even though they're all doing the same things which you would think would make them not special at all. Makes them all the same. You'd think.

I told my Homeroom teacher that when she gave us the lecture about taking the time now that we're in high school to learn who we are and develop a sense of individuality.

She wrote me up for "defiance."

I'm not really special. I'm the same as every other seventeen-year-old girl in the world. Wishing I had a different life because all the important things going on are being shoved on us but the people doing the shoving don't want to hear what we have to say. Wanting to be a princess or win the Nobel Prize or set fire to the school and watch it burn. Wanting to die, either because this world's too big and too hard on the shoulders and it's about to get dropped on its butt or because life is just so freaking boring stuck in the teen trap that the afterlife has got to be better than this.

Now I'm getting on the school bus, wondering what I'm doing. The problem I have with my routine of getting on the bus and going to school is that the only reason I'm doing it is that not doing it is illegal. Yeah, I'm seventeen and old enough to drop out if I really wanted to but I still live at home and the parental powers that be say I gotta be enrolled. Enrolling but not attending is illegal. So I'm stuck getting on this big, disgusting bus the color of stale orange juice with no radio, no AC, and no heater or seat belts – I anxiously await my imminent death by horrendous traffic accident – because the law said I had to.

Somehow there seemed like some bad thing about that. I mean, yeah, dropping out is a bad idea and dropouts make statistically less money but let's be honest here – I may not be special, but I got some good stuff up my sleeve. And no, I don't mean sports, or being an actress or a singer or whatever. I mean other, better things. Things I've already made money off of. Things that help out when I don't make money off the other things.

For example, I have my various fashion lines that I sell around Homecoming, Winter Formal, Spirit Week, and Prom to the kids at my school. I'm cheaper than most stores because I can throw stuff together with less than a full day of work and only fifteen or twenty bucks worth of fabric.

Also for example, I got Jamie.

His name's not really Jamie. It's James. But I don't go for calling him Jimmy – he's twenty-four, not four – and he's too big to be a Jim. Jims are thin and wiry, like beef jerky. My dad says twenty-four is way too old for me, but my mom says as long as we're not having sex she's fine with it. Jamie's not my boyfriend, so there's no problems there.

Jamie takes care of me.

Right now, we're sitting on the bus together behind the driver. It's the safest place to be. Supposedly, behind the bus driver is for losers and nerds and squares and whatever. In the three years I've been sitting there, though, I've never had gum in my hair or anything like that. No paper balls or bottle caps or spit wads – nothing. Jamie told me to sit there after someone snipped off my three-foot braid my Freshman year. He also cut my hair for me after that to fix the crap cut I got from my hair's arch-nemesis. Turned me into a redheaded flapper girl from the twenties, sans dress.

"You're hot in a black sweater," I told Jamie.

He fiddled with a match. He was hankering for a cigarette, but he was trying to pass for a fifth-year senior. I think. Maybe a sixth-year. I don't know how he pulled it off. Anyway, but he couldn't smoke on the bus because it's district (school district) property.

"Your hair would go great with a black sweater," he told me. He loved my hair, I dunno why. If I hadn't lost weight the summer after eighth grade – weight I wanted to keep – my face would've died underneath the wave-curl weight of the flapper cut.

Black sweaters were Jamie's thing. One of his things. Blue jeans and black sweaters. And not the skinny, tight sweaters that you wear with berets and black shades. Those are for the jazz cats and the snappy-beat poets in black. That's not Jamie. He wears XXL black turtlenecks big enough that the two of us could fit inside them, two peas in a pod.

Two rebels in a sweater.

Bus rides are generally quiet. I'm too tired to talk. His brains are busy thinking about whether or not we're gonna go hang out after school. It's always a debate because if he takes me anywhere we always stay out till midnight and I never do my homework which Jamie hates. He says I'm too smart to blow my grades just so we can watch _Xanadu_ and _Dirty Dancing_. He doesn't really enforce that too hard though. The guy should stop tempting me. Once we stayed up until dawn watching all the Tchaikovsky ballets – _Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, the Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty_ – while pigging out on shrimp-orange chicken chow-mein from the dollar store, lime jello, and cokes poured into crystal wedding glasses.

Jamie's a genius. He has the coolest stuff.

School's nothing special. Like everyone in it it, it tries to stand out and it fails miserably. What makes any school special is not the facilities or the funding or the friends or the fucking test scores. God, I hate test scores. Seems like that's all anyone in education cares about is standardized testing and the scores you get on them. Assholes.

There's a girl who's in all my classes – Rachel. She has a magazine on-line called _E-Rave Wave Acid Splash_. One of the smartest girls I've ever met in my life. Her test scores suck. She has something called "test anxiety" or something. She's in danger of missing out on graduation, which she cares about even though _E-Rave_ is one of the top zines on the web, because her test scores suck ass.

Like I said – education people are assholes.

What makes a school special is two things – the teachers and the library. It tells you something when your school library has books like _the Chocolate War, Annie On My Mind,_ and _Flowers in the Attic_. Yay for corrupt teachers, school-endorsed homophobia, and consensual sibling incest! It's actually cool when things like that happen, when libraries have awesome books like that, as long as the schools fess up to it.

If they don't, they're hypocrites. They should acknowledge the fact that they think we're smart enough to read stuff like _A Clockwork Orange_ without going totally bat shit loco. Our school apparently doesn't have that particular issue, but then again, Rachel Dale was suspended for writing homo-erotica even though they had _Clockwork_ in the library. I don't get it, but whatever.

I skate through math, not because it's easy but because I've done this twice before. I'm in trig – again. Fifth semester in a row. My teacher, Miss White, looks like the baby angel Gloria from _Touched By An Angel_ – shoulder-length brown hair, square glasses, blue eyes, round face that's almost too cute to be natural except for the tiny flaws like crow's feet and crooked teeth. I like her. The only exceptional thing about my trig class is that there's this Freshman kid in that class (a senior class, mind you!) who took algebra for high school credit in summer school before eighth grade, geometry in eighth grade, and algebra II the summer before high school. He's nice enough, I suppose, but I never talk to him because he makes me feel stupid.

Jamie says I shouldn't let my own insecurities deprive other kids of my awesome charm. Whatever. Nicotine has fried his brain.

My favorite classes are smack in the middle of the day – creative writing, where I write Block and Myers-style poetry; choir, of the Broadway chorus line variety; and Graphic Design, which I joined because my sister made some of the most rocking posters in that class. I wanted to do the same thing. I was working on a collage piece about Jamie. I took millions of pictures of him – he's my best friend, after all – all the time I'd just click-click-click capture him in silver. Now I was putting the pictures together to make a rainbow bridge into my life, a silver stairway invitation to see the boy – a man, really, I suppose – who lived in a 3-bedroom townhouse apartment and worked at a hole-in-the-wall bar and grill that served waffles and fried chicken on the same plate with red Kool-aid, the same guy who looked like a movie star from the fifties (or a fifties-era musical like _Grease_, in his slick leather jacket and tight black jeans with his gorgeous red hotrod from the Golden Days of car creation) or a beat poet/folk singer whose heart burned like napalm and sang about the Jack of Hearts.

That's what I was working on right now.

I had government and English with Jamie, but we didn't talk because he wanted me to pay attention in class. Sometimes I try to pass him notes or something, whisper to him, but he never listens or picks up the notes so I usually don't bother.

English is not my favorite class but it is one of the best classes in my school and my teacher is my favorite teacher. I got the best teacher – Mr. Noahs. He could rock your socks even though he was like, thirty-five. He would recommend books to me – I was still trying to find a copy of _On the Road_ at the public library (school library didn't have it, jerks) which had been mentioned in another book he'd loaned to me. He was the only adult I knew (besides Jamie, who doesn't count) who knew what _the Smoothie Song_ was and who'd come up with it – Google it, you can find it under Nickel Creek. He knew all the words to _Mr. Tambourine Man_ and _Werewolves of London_. He didn't make fun of me for liking Care Bears or studying vampires – he even recorded the ZZ Top video for the song _Break Away_ for me, which has a vampire motif – and I was the only person in his class that had higher than a 95 percent.

Government, on the other hand, sucks. My teacher – my friend Heather's dad – is a schmuck who can't control his daughter (which he didn't really need to do but kept trying it anyway) or his classrooms (which he definitely needed to). I'd flunked first semester because these three girls – Vanetia, Brittany, and Jersey – would end up dead if I had to keep listening to them call me racist for stating a statistic so I ditched before I did them permanent damage. The absent limit is eleven days. I missed twenty. Pulled a B- but they flunked me anyway.

Jamie said it was my own damn fault but I still thought it was stupid. I think that he thought so too, though he didn't want me to know it, because he rented a bunch of Tim Burton films the day I found out and let me spend the night at his place and get sick off of Pull-N-Peel Twizzlers. We had all the best films – _Batman Returns_, with that epic psycho scene of Michelle Pfeiffer turning into a deranged Catwoman after being shoved out of a gazillion story window; _Coraline_, with Neil Gaiman, a top-notch author of the awesome and bizarre paired with a top-notch director of the awesome and bizarre; _9_, which I hadn't seen before then, with the post-apocalyptic sentient rag dolls; _Alice in Wonderland_, way better than Disney's crap cartoon; _Corpse Bride_, which Burton wrote for his true love, Helena Bonham Carter (wrote a movie just for her, jeez!); and _the Nightmare Before Christmas_, with the rock-tastic Pumpkin King who reminded me so much of Jamie.

My best friend wrapped me up in a quilt made of fake Japanese and Indian silk and we watched movies and counted the seconds to see how long it took licorice to dissolve in spit.

I managed to make it through government – last class of the day, thank God – by thinking about that night and imagining what crazy shenanigans we were gonna get up to tonight.

We were getting ready to get on the bus after government and the end of school when Ms. Otis-Lee, the vice principal of my school that sucked so badly it has to remain nameless or the government will blow it up with an atomic missile, walked up to me. If I'd been a cat, I would've hissed and spit at her. Instead I watched her little pig eyes like marbles rolling in lard. I shuddered as they alighted on my face. Jamie touched my shoulder.

"Kate," Otis-Lee said. Her clothes stank of Febreeze. I wanted to hit her. It's like having an axe-murderer call you by your first name after they chop up your only baby.

"Yeah?" Gotta be civil. Damn it.

"I need to talk to you in my office." Ha!

"School's over. My bus is gonna leave."

"Your parents can come pick you up," she replied, and my back was up. She wanted to be hostile, fine. I heard a weird noise behind me, a strangled choking cough noise, and realized Jamie was making this fake siren noise underneath the cough, like in _the Girl Can't Help It_. But he was coughing so Otis-Lee wouldn't hear it. I tried not to smile.

"Um," I say, "no they can't. They're working," I inform her acidly.

My dad's a greeter at a grocery store, but he also writes humorous fantasy books on the side. He doesn't make as much money as my mom, though. She works from home – a versatile writer of everything from cheap romance novels to how-to guides on throwing out your veggies when your vegan parents go psycho on you to books of Block-style poetry about nuclear winter and gang violence (she wrote _Orpheus and Dice: A Legend with Reincarnation, Homosexuality, Incest, and Really Inconvenient Questions_, as well as _Shattered: A Morose, Morbid, Macabre, Pre & Postmortem Modern Teen Fairytale_) – but it would be an extreme inconvenience to her if she had to come all the way down here. It took her at least an hour to get back into "the flow" and she was running close on a deadline. I didn't want her to get screwed over by this flunky of a corrupt school system.

"Monday, then, Kate. We need to talk about some stuff."

"Yeah, okay, whatever."

Hell. What could she possibly want? Was this SEP related? Jeez, I hoped not. My SEP – Senior Exit Project – had been two years in the clearing. I'd picked it out as a sophomore. I wanted to be a writer, like my mom. Writing stuff to change the world. But how do you do twenty hours of shadowing on that? Watch your mentor type on her computer while you munch on popcorn? And it wasn't supposed to be a family member who mentored you, but my mom was the only person who lived in our state who wrote what I wanted to write. It had taken all of my Junior year to get her okay-ed as my mentor. Were they gonna slam it down into the dirt now?

Or was it something else?

I'm not special. I said that all ready. Or is it already? Whichever. I'm not some James Dean rebel girl like Natalie Wood (who had to prove she was a delinquent before they'd let her in the film). I'm not Baby from _Dirty Dancing_, ready to take on the whole world and kick some injustice in the ass, all while wearing a pretty dress and silver heels and dancing the night away with Patrick Swayze. That's not me. I'm just plain old Kate Martin, seventeen and crazy, like that girl in _Fahrenheit 451_, except I think she was sixteen.

I'm just me.

I'm not a victim, either, lost and lonely on the edge of the adult wilderness, not sure of where I belong, with the school administration taking cheap shots at me because I'm the odd duck and my parents refuse to be my champions. But I've been suspended twice in three years for things that weren't my fault. Not fighting, either. Nothing dangerous – no bombs or vandalism or anything. Other things. Stupid things. This was while my mother was out of town on writing conferences and stuff, or never would have happened.

So I was a little leery of Otis-Lee and anything she wanted to talk about.

The thing (well, one thing) that always confused me was why adults thought it was so crazy that other adults – certain individuals, not the whole group – could be out to get a kid. I mean the personal vendetta kind of thing. See, adults can have malicious and vengeful thoughts about other adults, and kids can be after other kids like white on rice. But two demographics fully capable of yearning to kill members of that same group are incapable of crossing age barriers?

What? How? Why?

Does that make sense to you because it sure as hell doesn't to me?

I brought it up to Jamie on the bus. He put his arm around me. Somehow, no matter what he does, he always ends up smelling like oranges, cigarette smoke, and Old Spice with a tiny hint of mint from his toothpaste. His breath is like temple incense. It's weird. But I like it. It's a good combination, like butter and strawberry jam on waffles.

"You worry too much," he says.

"They're gonna suspend me again, I can feel it in my teeth," I said.

"That's a cavity," he informed me, smiling. There was a laugh in his voice. When he does that, he sounds like Frank Sinatra when he's singing "Witchcraft." Only then. No other song of his has that sweet, laughing... lilt. "Don't worry," he adds, "if you get in trouble, you can stay at my place."

Hmmm. Movie marathons, Chinese noodles on Domino's pizza, readings of Francesca Lia Block and that one guy who wrote "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." That idea had it's points.

"Okay."

What would I do without Jamie?

Sometimes I get scared thinking about how big of a role Jamie plays in my life. I mean, what if he died or something? What would I do? I don't know how I'd handle something like that.

I've got a friend, Lori O'Neil – her brother Danny is eye candy from another planet – who says I worry more than a conspiracy theorist and a hypochondriac combined. But certain things that pop into your brain at night when you're trying to sleep – like toxic green bubbles of poison – they need to be addressed. At least a little bit. What would I do – what could I do – if something happened to Jamie? I mean, I'm not the girl with seven swan brothers or Gerda from _the Snow Queen_. I can't make shirts out of nettles or travel through the four seasons in search of my true love. I didn't have ravens for brothers, and even if I did, I wasn't about to go hacking off my fingers to use as keys for anyone.

Life isn't a fairy tale.

So... what?

Whatever. Jamie can tell I'm freaking. He pulls me in so I can lay my head on his shoulder. The sweater's around his waist now because of the heat, so my face is only separated from his warm skin by the white t-shirt that has a few old grease stains on the front. His entire torso moves when he breathes.

When I talk about Jamie at home – he's never met my parents – my dad says it sounds like I have a crush on him. I don't. I know what a crush is. It hurts like hell. This is different. I love Jamie, but not like that. It bothers me that people think you have to be romantically inclined just because you love someone totally and completely.

"What are we gonna do now?" I ask when we get off the bus.

"I don't know," he shrugs.

"Where's Washington Square?" I ask this to see what he'll say. It's so random, I'm hoping to catch him off-guard.

"Not in this state."

In the thirteen years I've known Jamie, that's one of the only questions that aren't about his past or his family that I've asked more than once that he won't answer. At least that I can think of off the top of my head.

A gust of wind blows my hair in my mouth. Dust pings and tinks off of my glasses lenses, blinding me. I flinch away from them instinctively. I duck my face against Jamie's chest.

He's like stone.

I look up, surprised. He didn't even put his arms around me. That's weird. Goosebumps poke through my suddenly cold skin. Overhead, thunder rumbles. The look on Jamie's face would've scared Marilyn Manson. I thought my heart would crack my sternum into little white bits. Jamie's eyebrows were drawn down into a tight V over his eyes, which were darkened from their usual smoky blue to a dark color I couldn't name. His nose twitched like a rabbit's. Was he smelling something? What?

In my mind, the _Jaws_ music starts to play. I shivered.

"What's wrong?" I asked. My head was full of push pins. Panic was turning my lungs to rocks. I had never seen Jamie look this way. It was a mix of fear and total pissed-off-ness.

"You need to go home."

His voice bit into my neck. The short hairs sliding across my nape prickled with static nervousness. In all the years we'd been chilling with each other, there'd never been a time where he'd sent me home when I really, really wanted to be with him. His place, with him, was the only really safe, stress-free place I had to go.

"Why?" I ask.

"Go, Kate."

"Jamie-"

"_Now!_"

And he turned, shoving his hands into the back pockets of his black Levis, and walked off. I watched him go, feeling my heart sinking into the toes of my brother Benji's borrowed combat boots. What had I done wrong? Why was he walking away? I didn't understand. And why wasn't I running after him? Why couldn't I?

I sucked in a breath. It stung like salt in a scrape. My eyes hurt with wet, red pain and my heart thumped in my feet, against my arches. The wind howled. A fat raindrop leapt from the sky to punch me in the nose. I jumped in shock. I don't think I've ever felt so alone in my life.

.

.

.

_**Author's Note:** this is a modern retelling of several myths and fairy tales including Sleeping Beauty, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Hades and Persephone, Orpheus and Eurydice, and the Glass Mountain. I am trying to see if I can get it published. What do you guys think?_


	2. Chapter 2

**Destiny  
The Soul-Shifting Adventures of a James Dean Rebel Girl**

.

**Chapter Two  
In the Dark**

.

.

I made it home after a half an hour walk. It was raining and hailing the whole time. I had a black eye because I didn't walk in the rain with my glasses on my face – I could see better without them since I didn't have my own personal set of windshield wipers. My clothes were soaked and clinging to me like a wet suit. When I get home, I'm either going to take a hot shower or strip naked and crawl into bed. Probably with a book. _The Catcher in the Rye_ sounded good.

"You're actually home on time," my dad said as I shut the door.

"Yeah." My voice is dull.

"I thought you'd be at Jamie's," he added, voice smug.

Score one for the Dad Unit. In the war between me and everyone else, it was currently zero points to the Kate Squad, and a gazillion scored up for the Dad Unit, the School Squad, and the other psychopaths I have to deal with.

My dad didn't like Jamie, didn't like me going to his apartment all the time. When my mother went to writing conferences, he forbade me to go. I'd sneak out, and he never knew. I learned the art of sneaking from Lori O'Neil. Even when my mom was here, he'd be a jerk about Jamie. I knew why – he didn't trust me. He claimed it was because he didn't trust Jamie, not me, but what's the difference? That's not to say I'm crazy and think Jamie and I are the same person. But Jamie has been my friend for thirteen years, and he's never done anything bad to me at all until today. We hardly ever even fight. So the only reason my dad would have to mistrust Jamie is if he thought that my friend could get around all my defenses, like my common sense (_no sex without condoms, being on the pill, STDs are bad, pregnancy is bad, run away from sex, oh my God help I saw a penis!_) which meant that he didn't trust me. Didn't trust my judgment or whatever. Which not only made him a jerk and a wimp, but a liar.

Lying is no bueno in _the Book of Kate_.

Parents never really trust their kids. They just tell you that so you'll trust them with your secrets – things like having sex, under-aged drinking, teen drug use. Stuff like that. As if we didn't know how to handle that kind of thing on our own. Now, sure, there are kids that don't, but your parents don't know those kids – they know _you_. They ought to trust _you_. And they don't. So why should _we_ trust _them_?

Thinking about the fact that I couldn't really trust my dad with anything except the obvious (not killing me, molesting me, beating on me, kicking me out, and of course that he'd feed and clothe me and such) and thinking about Jamie and why I was home – where I did _not _want to be – instead of watching _American Teen_ and _the Breakfast Club_ at Jamie's apartment made me grind my teeth. My mouth tasted like blood.

"Leave me alone! God! I'm not stupid, you know," as if I couldn't possibly be smart enough to read between the lines to find the subtext behind his speech. Smug jerk. I knew what he was hoping, what he was trying inexpertly to fish for – confirmation that Jamie and I were fighting. Then we wouldn't be around each other and I wouldn't be at his apartment as often. Parents like my dad think they're so slick.

"What?" He said.

But I dripped on into my room, ignoring him. I don't talk when I'm angry, depressed, and/or wet. I'm a teenage girl, a melting pot of out of control hormones on a super-huge Bunsen burner. I'm usually incapable of maintaining my composure when both my eyes and my clothes are crying. Jeez. You try it sometime. And the problem with losing your composure in front of adults is that then they jump down your throat because you're "overreacting," which we totally don't need right then. Yes, let's have everyone talk about how our emotional needs are too... needy.

Whatever. I'm being emo because I'm tired. Usually I ignore my self-pity thoughts.

I stripped and hung all my wet clothes across my little white bookcases, so they wouldn't grow mold. I was careful not to get the books wet. Tossed my bags – 2 messenger bags full of papers, notebooks, flyers, etc., a college-style backpack bigger than my torso and heavier than three babies, and a little red lunch box in danger of being labeled a biological hazard – into their proper corner, popped my fave mix CD – _Revolution Riot #3_ – into my boom box, and threw my naked self into bed.

I was shivering. I hadn't realized until just now. I cocoon into my sheets. I have six sheets, all solid colors (red, white, black, green, blue, and maroon) with words sewn onto them. Song lyrics, poems. Did it the summer I turned eleven. Some Al Stewart, Greenday, Bob Dylan (center of the black sheet in gold was _Mr. Tambourine Man_), Blackmore's Night (and this one song of theirs I like a lot called _Diamonds and Rust_ that was actually originally done by Joan Baez, supposedly about Bob Dylan but nobody can prove it), Taylor Swift, and Easyco – a local band that helped me once with an art project.

If you stitch it small enough, you'd be amazed how many songs you can fit on one queen-sized bed sheet.

I pulled the sheets tight to my body and try to warm up. I couldn't stop shivering. I kept thinking of Jamie and the pouring rain, pounding hail, and the hard, cutting blades of wind howling outside. Why did he leave me at the bus stop like that? Why didn't he walk me home? Was he all right?

Okay, yeah, I know what you're thinking. Total Bella Swan moment. If you haven't read or seen _Twilight_, Bella finds out this guy named Edward can read people's minds, but he can't read hers. Most people would say, "Dude, you're out of your freaking mind." But not Bella. Her reaction, "Is there something wrong with me?" Reminds me of the Goose Girl, seriously. Who cries to a stove pipe about their problems instead of just kicking the other chick's ass? Anyway, yeah, I pulled a Bella. Jamie acts like a total dick and ditches me, and my first thought – besides "holy crow I'm getting rained on" - is whether or not he's okay.

Sad, I know. But he's just... that was just weird. He's never done that before. If I didn't know better, I'd say he was on drugs or something. I mean, you hear about drug-addicted kids going nuts and turning into total psychos. So....

Nah. Jamie would never do that. I'd kick his ass into next month.

The phone rang. Right next to my head.

I think I jumped. I know I screamed. The phone's not really supposed to be in my room, so it scared me. I grabbed the stupid think and clicked TALK.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Kates," Jamie said. The knot in my stomach that had been pressing against my spine since the bus stop finally succumbed to my stomach acids and dissolved. Jamie went on, "Sorry about earlier."

The potential freak out I'd been nursing for the last thirty minutes or so ate up all of my gut wrenching fear and barfed up all of my seething anger. The first coherent words out of my mouth were, "_What the hell is your problem?_"

"I'm sorry, Kate."

He was. I could hear apologetical-ness in his telephone voice like ocean waves in a sea shell. But dang it, he'd scared me!

"Well," I said, trying to maintain my righteous wrath, "what was up? Why'd you ditch me?"

"I thought I saw someone I know."

Intriguing. He knows people I don't? Well... hmmm. Actually, yeah, probably. He has a job and stuff. I don't. Why don't I think about things like that? Was I some sort of clichéd blond girl that I didn't think of that before? Jeez. But who in the world could he have seen that made him act like that? Because the look on his face... my spine had turned to ice. The shiver-shakes, fed by the icy rain, had begun when I saw Jamie's expression.

"Who?" I ask. He says, "Don't worry about it."

"But, Jamie-"

"Get some sleep."

I glance at my alarm clock. It's not even that dark out, but the clouds and the rain have me all confused and I have to check the hour. Digital time blinks at me. It was hard to focus on the clock face. Blood red blinking light... irritating.

"It's not even five thirty," I say.

"Are you tired?"

Yes. My eyelashes were like super glue.

"No."

"Well, I'm picking you up at ten thirty, so you better be rested and ready to pull an all-nighter. Okay?"

"Are you gonna sing my name in the street?"

"What d'ya think this is," he asks in his Frank Sinatra "Witchcraft" voice. "_West Side Story_? Nah. I'm gonna throw rocks at your window, _Sound of Music_ style."

He's crazy, and I tell him so. We're both laughing like every thing's okay when we get off the phone, but I know my best friend. I know he's worried. Who did he see? Why won't he tell me? He's worried about something. I'm worried about him. I've got a scary, Alfred Hitchcock horror-film music feeling in my chest and behind my eyes. Why did we bring up _West Side Story_?

It's February. Spring should be on its way to us desert dwellers, but... but winter is suddenly breathing down my neck. I shivered.

Jamie's in some kind of trouble. I know it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Destiny  
The Soul-Shifting Adventures of a James Dean Rebel Girl**

**.**

**Chapter Three  
****The Kids in Black**

**.**

**.**

I fell asleep after the call and woke to the musical plinky-plink of pebbles on the window like ice in a scotch glass. The rain still poured. Everything was sheeted by water, even the street lights. I hate monsoon season because of this.

I look out the window which is wet with rain and I can see myself reflected not in the glass but in Jamie's face – a red-haired flapper goddess in a black sheet-toga with gold poetry brushing against my skin. The wind blows my hair across my eyes. I push it back and Jamie's suddenly at my window, dripping wet and tousled. His white t-shirt is clouded cellophane against the muscles of his chest. He's like Huck Finn or Peter Pan, out there in the rainy night, grinning at me, his eyes on fire.

"Get in here, you psycho!" But I'm laughing.

"Come on," he urges. Is this how Wendy felt when Peter Pan pulled her towards the nursery window? Sometimes he makes me want to just run into the night and never go home.

"I'm in a sheet," I remind him – remind myself. "Get in here before you get sick."

"Hurry up," he said, climbing in like a monkey on a jungle gym. I'd removed the screen on my window ages ago. When my father found out, he was certain I'd taken up smoking – as if – but my mother made him let it go. Somehow, she knew why I needed the screen off without me having to talk about it, and she knew I'd never abuse the "screen privilege," as she called it. "The moon's poking out of a gap in the clouds. The sidewalks are about to light up like a frickin' Christmas tree!"

The Frank Sinatra lilt tingled over my skin and made me giggle. I make him turn around while I wiggle-worm into dry panties and put on a bra. It sounds dumb but I don't know what to wear. I rifle through my closet, humming "Billie Jean[1]."

I like Jackson's oldies. Get over it.

So I'm humming that song, imagining Jamie soaking my carpet with the diamond raindrops coming off of his nose and fingers and wrist bones, and I grab this little petticoat-style miniskirt that I modified to make it knee-length, this ruffly type skirt-thing the pale washed out color of the spring sky after it rains when the clouds are thin but still hanging around. I shimmy it on, grab a black tank top with an Amy Brown fairy on it, and my denim jacket that I found at Goodwill and studded with all these store-bought, free-styling gold and white and silver buttons.

Need shoes, though.

"We're gonna lose the moon," he says, and I think of what book we might read when we get to his place. Jamie just bought _Guarding the Moon_, by Francesca Lia Block. He was really excited because he loved the idea of motherhood but obviously couldn't have any kids, being a dude, and we both loved Ms. Block's way of expressing herself.

"Won't," I said.

"Will, crazy girl."

"Cool it, crazy boy," I say, quoting "Be Cool" from _West Side Story_, hugging my body as I think about what we're about to do.

I hear girls talk at school about sex and how exciting and great it is, and I know it can be when you've got a good guy who cares about making sure both of you have a good time. Still, this is way better. Sex has inconvenient strings dangling off of it, waiting to latch onto you, and it causes lots of chemical imbalances in your brain when you're under thirty, tricking you into thinking the guy you just screwed is The One when he's just someone.

But me and Jamie... he had this way of thinking of things to do that could scald your mind like the first bite off of an extra cheese and pepperoni pizza when you're starving and haven't eaten all day – hot and it kinda hurts, but at the same time you don't care because it tastes so good.

Thinking about all this, I hugged myself again. It feels liquid blue under my bones, like a thousand rivers of turquoise blood. My blood is blue diamond rain. I glanced at Jamie. His eyes are blue raindrops, like my heart, just as big, bigger even. The air sizzles lightning white around and between us. I grab my white tennis shoes with the mismatch double laces to make them extra long. _Rainbow Brite, Invader Zim, Silver Hawks, Care Bears_, and at the end, so I can have multicolored aglets, _Voltron: the Defender of the Universe_, chopped into bits and stitched on at the ends – red, blue, green, yellow. My shoes, with their fabric paint swirls and stars and things, sparkle in the night light glow from an occupied wall socket. My heart is so big and liquid rain style in my chest right now, I felt like I'd explode. I shoved on my shoes, start to get going, remembered my folks.

Jamie saw the memory on my face. Sometimes my face is like a mirror, reflecting everything that crosses my mind, from the memory of my fave fantasy movie playing in my head to the color of my internal rainbow to why I cry every time I have to get dressed to go to school even though I love my clothes. And my best friend can read my silver-glass face like a children's picture book because we know each other that well.

"You need to tell your Mom?"

He likes my mom. I nodded.

"Make it fast, okay?" He says. "Thunderclouds are rising fast. I can feel it."

I race down the hall to my mom's office. I think, but I'm not sure, that I'm not running to my mother, but running from the tense static sound in Jamie's voice. There's raw and electric tension in his eyes. Diamonds like aqua rain, but they can cut, like thorns. I'm suddenly as scared as the moonless nights in rated R movies. Fear is copper blood in my mouth. The blue is dissipating.

"Mommy?" I call, knocking. If you don't make noise, my mom jumps out of her skin when she finally notices you.

"Yeah?" Her version of "come in."

I walk into the office, full of at least fifteen huge and mismatched bookcases – bought for super cheap at Goodwill – some full of DVDs like _Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, My Neighbor Totoro, Fly Away Home, Gideon's Trumpet, _and _the Golden Compass_ (she refuses to own the book series); some with a few spiral notebooks stacked on the deep shelves, some with those fancy leather journals you can get at the big bookstores at the malls with the gilt pages and the fancy gold and silver leaf on the front, back, and spine. But mostly, books. All kinds of things from Harlequin Romances to _the Heralds of Valdemar_, Lois Duncan to _Little House on the Prairie_, _Artemis Fowl_ to VC Andrews. Every book, actually, by Tamora Pierce, Robert Cormier, and in the _Once Upon a Time_ series. More than twenty-thousand books in this one room – which was actually the second master bedroom. My mother is _crazy_. There's a stereo, a two-monitor computer, a laptop, a television, DVD player and VCR combo, even a Playstation 3 because my mom's in love with _Kingdom Hearts_.

She says it all helps her write.

The walls above the book cases are decorated with airbrush and aerosol paintings my mom bought at the county fair over the last thirty years (since she was thirteen), cross-stitched tapestries of scenes from books, and hanging bamboo cuts with watercolor paintings.

Now you know where I get it.

At the computer desk, notebook in hand, knees crossed with her bare feet on the desk (her toenails sport black French tips) is my mother – hair almost to her knees from twenty-four years of prenatal vitamins, glasses sliding off her nose, sucking on the tip of a pen. The glass bottle on her desk gleams under the overhead light.

People see her sucking on that bottle while she's writing. It's always there, full of some bubbling brown substance no one can identify because the bottle was handmade in one of her college art classes and has no label, only these gorgeous star burst designs. They think she's an alcoholic, but I'll let you guys in on a little secret – it's full of Coke-a-Cola. No booze. I check, often, by asking for a sip.

She never says no.

Though she does sing _the Cola Song_ from that one Faith Hill commercial every time I ask.

"What do you need, baby?"

She tucks one long strand of hair behind her ear. Most of it is kept back from her face by a blue bandanna she found in the street once in tenth grade. I told her it probably belonged to a gangster, but she kept it.

"I'm going out with Jamie," I say.

She looks at me over the rims of her spectacles. I didn't know why she did this. It wasn't as if she could see me, especially since the only eye with a decent view of me was her left eye – the hereditary bad one.

"It's Friday," I remind her when she tugs at her old engagement ring – synthetic sapphire, diamond, aquamarine, sterling silver – on the iron chain around her neck. Like a kind of sign language. Mom-sign. That should be a book. _The Teen Guide to Understanding Mom Sign._ The tugging, almost absently, means "Hmmm. Not so sure about that idea, kid." The clock reads 10:21 pm. It can't be "too late" to go out. I've gone out at three in the morning before with parental consent.

"Drive careful in the rain," my mother says, turning back to her notebook. I can see her hasty, but incredibly neat and small handwriting – her capital letters take up less than half of the college rule line – scrawled across the page. "And nothing romantic," she adds, though I could tell from her tone that she was only saying that so when my father had a heart attack, she could remind him that she'd warned me. "Keep it fraternal."

"No problem. Platonic as a Greek philosopher," I say, hug her – she smells of strawberry and red cherry jam, prepackaged waffles, cold north seas, and night-blooming jasmine in summer with honeysuckle – and run back to him.

We take off into the rainy night, making sure we close the window on the way out. The wind tousles my hair. It's no longer howling. I taste the sky and the wilderness as raindrops slide into my mouth. In the distance, through the Aquarian veil of the pouring skies, I can vaguely make out the shape of Jamie's car, a T-bird, the old kind from those old movies, like the one in the old song. I feel like I'm in some crossway mix between _the Fast and the Furious_ and _Grease_. My chest is full of lightning and hotrod oil lit up to blue flames by cigarette lighters. I even start singing "Grease Lightning" up at the sky.

Yes, I do randomly burst out into song. Don't you?

Under the burnt pumpkin glow of a street lamp I can see the fire-engine red paint job. Wherever my feet slap the pavement, the sidewalk lights up bright white like in an eighties music video, lit up like the Hollywood Boardwalk. The world has that silver glamour sparkle from the black and white forties' films and it's beautiful.

We make it to the Thunderbird and it happens again.

Jamie turns to stone. It's like he just got a big smack on the lips from Medusa. His eyes are hot glass shards that slice the night and me. I watched his nose twitch as if his sense of smell could thrust past the sting of expectant lightning, thunder, the icy kiss of the rain in our noses.

"Jamie?"

"Get in the car," he snapped. It's like a slap in my face. My skin stings.

"Why? What's wrong?" I look around, trying to spot what he's looking at. My heart in my throat chokes me with drumming thrumming blood. I can't swallow my hammer snare pulse and put it back into my chest. I'm soaked and don't care. My bones are legions of maggots. Something's out there – I can taste it.

"Get in the car, Kate!"

He yells at me, and I finally see them

There are three of them. My chest burns. They're only kids, like me, like Jamie, none of them older than nineteen if that, but I hate them. It hurts how much I hate those kids. I've never seen them before but there they are like a bad dream, back from the dead, back in black, the bad guys in some old western film with Clint Eastwood and a man in black, Hell's own skeleton crew, teen vamps with blood red eyes but I only think they're red because these freaks coming up on us are too nebulously evil to be classified as bloodsuckers. They move like zombies, like sleepwalkers, and when I realize I can't look away from them I remember a snatch of phrase from _the Goblin Market_.

_We must not look on goblin men...._

A sob catches in my throat. The blood fear is back, back in my mouth, biting the tip of my tongue. The voice in my head – the voice of sanity, Jamie's voice, my mother's voice – is saying, "Run, run, run!"

"Who are they?" I manage to whisper.

"Get in the car, come on," Jamie says. The knife edge voice is paralyzing me. His fear shrouds those kids like poisonous gas. I think – or am I imagining it? – that I can see their teeth gleaming and their eyes black as marbles in the sockets, even though it's pouring rain and they're far enough away that I can't see what color their hair is or whether they're guys or girls. All I can think is, "_West Side Story, West Side Story_, it's coming, it's coming, oh no...." And those kids were walking toward us and I just can't move, I can't, can't even breathe, the world swimming in front of my eyes. I'm going to faint. The _Jaws_ music pounds in my brain.

"Oh, hell, Jamie...." I whispered, and he suddenly grabs me by the back of the neck, startling me out of my fear-paralysis and he shoves me into the car, I don't know how he got to me like that, but I'm in the T-bird and he hood slides just like Bo Duke across the wet metal hood and jumped into the driver's seat. His hands fumble the keys.

"Shit, shit, shit!" He mutters. "Shit!"

"Jamie!"

They're not even twenty feet away, those monster kids. Rain had plastered my hair to my head, dripped off my glasses, soaking my clothes. I was shaking wet. And I can see those kids coming. For a second, the world is green and hot and sickly. My brain feels like a Stephen King novel. My heart is a witch doctor's drum, pounding up fear and horror and the knowledge that suddenly slugs me in the face that I very well could die out here, tonight, with Jamie.

"Roll up the windows!" Jamie yelps. His fear galvanizes me.

My hands were so slick at first that they just slip off the rollers for the windows, but I managed to get a grip and shove the windows up finally. Right then, the engine roared to life. It wrenches a scream out of me and I jumped a mile in the air, whacking my head on the roof of the car. Not wearing a seatbelt, I realize absently. With a cry of near fear and savage exultation, like Tarzan in the books or John Bender in _the Breakfast Club_, Jamie revved the engine so it roared like a dragon and we screeched away into the rainy night.

The kids in black watched us drive away.

"Who were those guys?" I demanded.

"Don't worry about it."

"What? No, they tried to kill us!" I felt sure that if we hadn't moved, we both would've been deader than dead. I don't know how I knew it, but those "kids" wanted to do us real damage.

"Don't be dramatic," he says.

I stared at him incredulously as the lights burn through the car windows and light up his profile like a forest fire. Dramatic? I was being dramatic? I was going to kill him! Those guys... those kids were like something out of a Dean Koontz novel. Like in _the Taking_. Demons. Devils. There was just something that was so totally, absolutely wrong about the whole group. Jeez. Just thinking about it, about them, turned my skin to ice and my heart into a drum. My fingertips tingled as if they were waking up after being asleep for a long time. As soon as I noticed it, my chest tightened.

_By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes._

Shakespeare, _Macbeth_.

Freaky.

In most situations like these – not being stalked by psychotic, supernatural entities dressed up to look like pseudo-goth teenagers, but just situations where I wanted to curl up in a ball and hide under a rock for the rest of my life so no one would ever be able to find me, no matter how far down the rabbit hole they went – these situations made me want to hug Jamie. There's just something so comforting about hugging a strong guy, listening to his heart so that you know he's right there with you, and he's warm and you feel so safe.

It's not romantic, it's not sexual. It's only like that if you make it. All it is, is the knowledge that here is someone you trust, someone strong enough to protect you, strong enough to let you fight for yourself first until you really need this champion. Strong enough to let you win the fight but loving enough that you can go to them when the weakness hits your knees and the butterflies fly back into your stomach and you can't stand up anymore and you'll fall if they don't catch you. And your skin is ice and your heart is cold and tears are hot in your eyes and all you need is one person to hold onto you until you can pull yourself back together again. Sometimes you get it from a huge group of girls, but you normally get it from a single guy or two. Jamie does that for me usually.

But how could I hug him, find comfort from him, when he said all that stuff about being dramatic? Why would he just shove my panic into the dirt like that?

Then it hit me like a sledgehammer on crack. He's hiding something from me, something big. He'd never do something like this to me, knowing the way I am, knowing how I hang on him because there really _is_ no one else. Jamie's not a jerk, whatever he might've done in the last ten hours, and he would never make me cry on purpose. He has something to hide.

Something huge.

"Who are they?" I demanded. I try to put some kind of authority in my voice, pushing at him with my mind, thinking hard at him to just give up and surrender the information. Somehow, despite the obvious suddenness of the situation, I knew instinctively that there was something I needed to know about this whole thing. Not sure, but I think it has something to do with me.

"Kate," he growls, teeth clenched. I'm reminded of Forty-Seven from the movie _Hitman_. "Drop it. Just drop the whole thing, okay?"

"Tell me," I say. "It's important, I know it." Resentful of the fact that in order to get him to level with me about something incredibly dangerous to us both I had to both level with him and bug him until it drove him crazier than an ADHD kid on speed, I added, "Do you know them?" My voice was like slivers of ice in my throat. I chafed my hands when the frigid fingers began to shiver and shake. "Is that it? Those were the people you saw today, aren't they? What is going on?"

Keeping my eyes riveted on him, I saw his hands white and slick with rain on the steering wheel and I realize we haven't turned the heater on though we're both turning into Popsicles. His hands shook. He wanted a cigarette bad, I could tell. It was his security blanket of sorts. There are blue diamond points in his eyes. I was close to that push pin skull panic again when I see his eyes.

"Kate-"

He's going to blow me off. No way.

"Jamie," I say, trying to shove every ounce of earnestness into my voice. "Tell me."

The rain skitter-skated on the windshield. The electric lights lit up the leather interior of the purring Thunderbird, lit up the deep worry lines on Jamie's forehead. The clock on the radio had acid green numbers that seared my night-adjusted eyes. Barely eleven pm. I waited for Jamie to speak. Bongo drums beat a Rasta rhythm in my chest. Blood fear poisoned my mouth, and copper stench filled my nose.

"I can't," he says finally.

I cross my arms across my chest, hoping he hasn't noticed the way my tank top clung like silk to my wet body, showing more of my breasts than I'd expected. Glaring, I settled in to fight him to the end. I won't let him out of this. I _have_ to know.

"If I do, then things will get really bad. Okay? Just... okay, look, just trust me, okay? You're my best friend and I don't want you to get into any kind of trouble. Any trouble. Okay?"

"You say 'okay' a lot, ya know that?" I jibed him. My lips were numb from cold rain and cold conversation. My eyes glitter, I can feel the crystal prickles in my eye sockets.

"Kate!" He yelled, startling loud in the confines of his car.

I know it's serious now. He would never yell at me like that just for making a joke unless we were in some kind of trouble. But if we were in trouble, why wouldn't he tell me? I knew, though, that it was way, way serious, whatever trouble was coming. So I nodded. I have never had a reason to question Jamie ever, until tonight. Never, ever. So what was I supposed to do? Should I trust that he knows what's best in a really bizarre situation that I know absolutely nothing about? He's been my best friend for thirteen years. Or do I kick his ass for holding out on me?

Sigh. Choice made.

"If you're in real trouble, I deserve to know," I say, trying to keep my voice gentle.

He blows out a smoker's breath, a nervous habit when things get tense. He's in real, real, real trouble then. Like gangster trouble. Mob trouble. Maybe murder or CIA trouble. Taxes? It took down Al Capone, after all.

Supernatural trouble? I mean, I'll be the first to admit that I have contingency plans in case zombies invade. So does my mom. We're not like, super firm devout believers in monsters or anything, but we live less than a day's drive from Mexico and my mother refuses to take us in case a chupacabra decides we look tasty. Once she married my dad and moved out of her parents' house, she refused to visit her grandparents up in New Jersey because she'd heard on television of a woman and her son being attack by the Jersey Devil.

So was I willing to consider some weird demonic angelic thingy going on? Yes. At least half-heartedly.

"I'll tell you," he says, and I snap my attention back to our conversation, "when we get to my place."

Well, I would have to be satisfied with that. I know why he wanted to wait for a bit before we talk. He needs to figure out all what he's going to say, or whether to really say anything at all. Sometimes, he could be super sneaky, like a baby trying to put something sharp and pointy in its mouth. But I am not going to let this go. Never. No way. Not until the whole thing went away and our lives could go back to normal. Whatever normal was.

We sat in silence in the car as the stale orange lights, like the mango juice they serve at zoo camp – pale, washed-out and old looking, and tasting strongly of rancid hot dogs – burned like torches in the darkness of the city. Love the light pollution laws usually, put in place for the observatory people to stargaze. Not tonight. Things are a bit too freaky to be in a really dark city right now.

The rain chimes on the windows, diamond bright under the oncoming headlight beams, and the acid clock numbers blink in the interior darkness surrounding and muffling us both in the car.

After awhile of sitting in long, dimly and intermittently lit shadows and uncomfortable silence, Jamie flicked on the radio. Immediately "Lola" by the oldies group the Kinks comes on. I can't help but laugh a little. It's always a good day when you can listen to a song about a guy who accidentally picks up a chick named Lola at a bar, dances with her, hits on her, and then realizes she's a dude.

"That's perfect," I say.

"Cute, that's cute," Jamie says, and his Frank Sinatra voice is back, tickling my neck. Things are nowhere near as bad as they could be, then.

He could still laugh.

* * *

[1]I don't give a rat's butt whether or not Michael Jackson bleached his skin & had 40 million nose jobs & looked like a woman & molested kids. I mean I care if he molested kids because that's just sick but I still like his music. His early music when he was still "black." His early music like _Billie Jean_ & _Thriller_ & _Black or White_, is awesome & I grabbed it off of the internet for free so he didn't make a dime off my contributions while he was alive and he's dead now.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

**In the Mourning**

We were in the car.

Rain tink-tink hammers on the roof of the car. The sky cried against our windows and the windshield of the fire engine red 'Bird. Burnt pumpkin glow flashes by me. In the steamy, glistening wet dark outside my chrome and steel shield, those kids are waiting. I knew that. The certainty of it filled me up like water in a pitcher. Eventually my knowledge would overflow out of me and I'd go stark raving nuts.

The music on the radio chimed in the heavy silence between us. Every note hits my ears like a sledgehammer. Why won't Jamie talk to me? What can't be spoken in the dark interior of his Firebird? What's so secret?

And who are those freaky kids waiting to hurt us?

I don't know how I know it, but those kids weren't just regular kids. Witch kids, demon kids, whatever, I didn't know, but they were more dangerous than any human monster on this planet. The very surety of it filled me with icy dread. I shiver in the chill air inside the car and my best friend ratchets up the heat again for me.

Why isn't he shivering? Doesn't he feel the cold? It seems he never does. In summer or winter, he wore the same clothes - black sweaters over white, short sleeved undershirts and jeans of varying colors: blue, black, white. Never did Jamie sweat, or shiver, or flush with the heat or turn blue with the cold. Stupidly, I'd ignored it, thinking he was just good at regulating his body temperature. But now... not so much. No, not so much now. There's something about him that makes electricity arc inside my skull. It's some idea, waiting for me to speed up and snatch it.

Something deep inside of me made me wonder if I really wanted to know what my subconscious was trying to tell me.

Instead of trying to break that lead-heavy silence surrounding us both by talking, I closed my eyes and thunked my head against the window. The heat of my skin burned away the mist crawling up the glass. Through the evanescent haze I watched the night go by and tried to think of happier, lighter things until we made it to Jamie's place.

Weekend nights - any nights, actually - spent at Jamie's are fun. On school nights he would bug me about school work sometimes but not tonight. It was Friday night, and he owed me an explanation. Those kids, the demon witch kids that were after him.

Or was it us?

Did they want me too?

Jamie's apartment is at the intersection of a street named after a type of cheese and a street one intersection over from Broadway. That's how I remembered how to find it. My brain was an encrypted treasure map, I was a wild-eyed corsair girl, and Jamie was the treasure. Jamie, and all his wonderful things.

As we stepped into his townhouse apartment through the coral red door, the fear slid back and the mermaid feeling comes.

I get the mermaid feeling whenever we go to his apartment. I've never been alone here, so I don't know if that would affect it, but I don't think so. As I'm standing in the entryway, the rain water pearls on my skin, drips off. My edgy fear ripples beneath my skin. But at the same time, waves of contentment, of safety, wash over me starting at my toes and working upwards.

I love his apartment. It's always been my haven. Temple! That's what it is. I can't explain but you'll see.

On the floor are beautiful ceramic tiles that each have a tiny mural on it, and together resolve into a rainbow-hued Celtic knot. The air is all full of incense, patchouli, cigarette smoke, Ocean Breeze scented candles, and the ice and oranges Jamie runs through the garbage disposal to clean it out and make it smell nice. On the walls are movie and rock band posters; huge portraits of stars as Greek gods (the Plutonian Marilyn Manson and a Marilyn Monroe-style Aphrodite, the Orphean Kurt Cobain and the multi-talented Johnny Depp in various costumes as masculine Muses) and murals of fairy tales starring child and teen actors from across the decades. The windows sleep under cartoon-sheet curtains fringed with black and hot pink lace. Strings of crystal beads chime against the doors and window panes. The raggedy patchwork couches and chairs are heaped with Chinese silk pillows and hand-embroidered afghans.

I immediately hopped onto the main couch, sinking into the black and brown leather. A blue velvet cushion with silver braid catches my eye - it says _the Snow Queen_ in white ice letters - and I hug it to my chest.

Now Jamie has this thing, this special way of moving that only comes out for dangerous things. It kind of reminds me of the way Bernardo, one of the gang leaders in West Side Story, moves during the snap-dance at the beginning of the movie, the slinks and slides. Those shimmer-glimmer cocktail witch girls got nothing on him. I call it the Lynx, like the jungle cat. He moves like a monster man full of menace moving in to murder the masses. And his smoky baby-blue eyes burn lighter-flame hot.

Jamie's lynxing now. He doesn't know I notice it, but I notice everything about everything when I can. So I just watch him lynx on into the kitchen.

"Burritos?" He asks.

I sighed. Irritated, I replied, "Who were those kids?"

"Food first, grasshopper," he said.

Sigh again.

I heard a metal-flick noise, a flitter-flutter, and the scent of nicotine incense filled the air, old as classic literature and sweet as a girl in Mary-Jane shoes.

I don't expect any grown-ups to get that. Cheers to you, Greenday fans.

It took less than ten minutes to get the chicken and cheese burritos and paper-thin sliced pancakes and blueberry preserves. He even brought out cherry Kool-aid and coke, poured into crystal wedding glasses. Whatever this was, he felt bad about it, and me. Why?

"Okay," I said, watching him out of the corner of my eye as he slink-lynxes back over to me and slithers to the couch. "Spill it."

Silence.

"Tell me," my voice is crystal violin strings, tight enough to snap if the pressure ratchets up any higher. "Jamie, you gotta tell me. Those freaks, those kids... who are they? What's going on?"

"They're... they're hell hounds, Kates."

Okay, wait. Pause. Back up, rewind to right before that. Now play that again for yourself. Did you catch that? I think I imagined it. Better make sure.

"What, now?"

"They're hell hounds, Kate. Those kids... they know me. Their names are Ciera, Berret, and Rosalyn, and they are bad news. Big time bad news. I screwed up and now they're here to find out why and fix it."

He won't meet my eyes.

In my chest, the fear-drum of my heart begins a new rhythm, slow and spiky, echoing the rising panic in my throat. Those kids were supposed to be demon dogs or whatever. I didn't even know what that meant. I knew a lot about mythology and stuff, but hell hounds weren't exactly my area of expertise. What I did know was that Jamie's dripping wet hair drip-dripped water onto his cheeks like blue tears and the pain reflected in the water burned my mouth like neon yellow acid. Was I about to learn something I didn't really want to know?

"How did you screw up?" I ask.

He looked up at me then, the burning dot of his cigarette mirrored in his eyes, a trio of crimson embers. Agony slithers under my skin, waiting to be unleashed. What is he going to say? What could he have done to summon those freaks?

"I stayed with you, Kate."

Stunned, too stunned to think, to breathe, to understand. Why was that a screw up? Who were those slinky black wraith kids? Hell hounds, yeah sure. But they looked pretty human to me. Werewolves or something? Jaws music plays in my head at the idea. Am I right, they're some kind of shape shifters? Or am I going completely gonzo?

My mouth is ice. It burns my tongue with the cold and freezes my lips, trapping my questions in my throat. All I can do is stare at him and will him to explain it to me.

"Kates... I'm not who you think I am."

Okay, had that one pegged from about age twelve, I think to myself, the sarcasm hot against the ice in my mouth. The frigid frost grip begins to melt a little. Soon I'll be able to speak. Hopefully the words won't melt away in the heat. The shock might wipe my questions from my brain if I'm not careful.

Looking into his eyes - blue as Peter Pan's, full of grief, they hurt like glass - the ice thaws a little. My heart quakes and my fear burns like hell.

"Who... who are you then?"

"I... I'm dead, Kates. I've been dead since before your parents were born."

Immediately, my brain hits on Twilight, on the Night World, on Anne Rice and a whole bunch of other vampire books sitting on my mom's bookshelves. Was that what he meant? Was he an undead bloodsucker prolonging his unholy unlife with human or animal blood? Somehow, I sincerely doubted that. There was too much that was human about him for it to be something that dark.

Jamie skipped and jumped and ran around in the sun like a frolicking puppy on steroids, he ate regular food with the savagery of every obnoxious boy between five and twenty-five known to man, and he went to church with me every Sunday. We used to play in the woods when I was a kid, and he did woodshop in his spare time. He drank lemonade, ate garlic bread until his breath made me want to puke, and he bought me a silver necklace for my birthday every year. Weren't aversion to all those things - sunlight, food, churches, wood, lemons, garlic, and silver - the indicators of vampirism? If he took a vampire test, he'd fail, he was so human.

But if he wasn't a vampire... then what? My brain wouldn't supply the answer.

"What, are you like... a zombie?" I joked, trying to smile but my mouth remained frozen. "Or a demon or something? Maybe you turn into a wolf at the full moon? Or are you just a random immortal?"

For a long time, he was silent. Suddenly, he reached out to touch my hair, brushing it back from my forehead. I blinked up at him and watched him get ready to shatter my world with the revelation of what he was.

"It's okay, Jamie," I managed to whisper. "You can tell me."

He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to him. His skin was wet, and his shirt clung to him, but I didn't care. Like I so often did, he needed a hug, so I let him hug me. When his lips moved against my ear, I tried not to jerk away. His confession shocked me.

"I'm a ghost, Kate."


End file.
